Hydronarratives: The Confluence of Water and Environmental Justice

What agency can Americans exercise?

Whether the dealings and legislature behind closed doors are concerning and opportunistic or not, it’s important to realize the privilege it is to have access to piped running water in the first place. On a national scale, Americans sort of expect running water, whether public or private. On a more global scale, a study found that 49.7% of citizens living in low and middle income countries are inaccessible to running water. As tragic and hopeless it is that lawmakers take advantage of citizens regularly in order to score a profit, the disparity between high income countries and low/mid income countries is obvious to most citizens. If lots of the rest of the world is foundationally struggling and worse off, I’d argue that it makes Americans content with what they do have. Therefore it shifts them out of a place of seeking for additional water justice before the rest of the world gets theirs in its most basic form. Nevertheless, our country is independent. Regardless of our relative advancement, we should not have to put up with nefarious deals between chemical companies and areas of the government that attempt to maintain their riches at our expense.

If Americans have problems with the country’s federally regulated drinking water, or if public water isn’t accessible to them, they have the option to use private water wells as an alternative. That isn’t what people usually do though. Private wells are usually only used when a person is not accessible to public water systems, not because they serve as a safe alternative to the public water systems and their numerous contamination issues. In fact, there’s evidence indicating the very opposite. A  2016 study was conducted to test and compare the water safety levels between public and private water. Even though checking an individual well for harmful microbes seems promising, it isn’t practical because of the quantity and private nature of them. Therefore, the data was collected by comparing hospital visits for acute gastrointestinal illness across the state from more urban areas (closer to public water systems) to more rural areas (that typically rely on wells). Based on the results, there’s new evidence indicating that people relying on private wells for water suffer disproportionately from gastrointestinal illnesses, a typical effect of drinking water contaminated with microbes. Evidence indicating this conclusion means that Americans should use private wells only as a last resort for water. However, I believe the methods for this study aren’t a lead-pipe cinch (no pun intended). The main metric used to calculate and compare data for the two groups (public and private water consumption) is the amount of emergency room visits of patients suffering from acute gastrointestinal illness (AGI). As we discussed, a majority of the citizens who rely on private water are those who are inaccessible to public water systems (aka, rural citizens). The figure does indicate that the more rural areas of North Carolina report more cases of acute gastrointestinal illness. To supplement this study’s findings, I believe that acute gastrointestinal illness needs to be very well understood in order to make a conclusion about our water’s safety based on hospital reports of patients with acute gastrointestinal illness. Because if there are several causes for AGI, we can’t prove the water’s role in it. It’s safe to conclude for now that there’s evidence indicating that public water works are safer than private wells, but there’s more room for research and experimentation.


The discovery of the government taking advantage of its people in some safety regards doesn’t bode well for the collective faith in the government. However, distrust will not motivate change until the slow violence is exposed. A massive contributing factor to the continuation of flawed lawmaking and greedy politicians is the covert nature of the violence. Acceptance, motivation, and voice are enough to reverse damages done to our country and people. Don’t believe me? It’s already happened. Even though the TSCA had problematic, corporation favoring clauses, we discussed that the voices of some contributed massively to the cause of making a safer country for everybody.

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